Sam Altman has agreed to return to lead OpenAI, the company said in a Wednesday, November 22 post on X, just days after his surprise removal as chief executive.
His removal sparked an employee revolt against board members that threatened to crash the leading company in the artificial intelligence industry.
“We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board,” the company said, adding that the board will be chaired by Bret Taylor, a former co-CEO of Salesforce. Other members include Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
“We are collaborating to figure out the details,” it said.
In his own post on X, formerly Twitter, Altman wrote that he is “looking forward” to returning to OpenAI and building on the firm’s “strong partnership” with Microsoft, which is the ChatGPT maker’s biggest financial backer.
The announcement appears to bring to an end days of chaos for the AI industry that included negotiations over who should lead OpenAI and how the firm should be run.
In its announcement Friday, OpenAI claimed that Altman had been insufficiently “candid” with the board.
But a key factor in Altman’s ouster was the presence of tensions between Altman, who favored pushing AI development more aggressively, and members of the original OpenAI board, who wanted to act more cautiously.
As of Monday morning, Altman, along with fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, said they would be joining Microsoft to lead a new AI research division while OpenAI said it had hired former Twitch chief Emmett Shear as interim CEO.
But then hundreds of OpenAI employees, nearly the company’s entire staff, threatened to leave, potentially for Microsoft, if the company’s board didn’t resign and reinstate Altman as CEO.
Brockman is also returning to OpenAI, according to his post on X.
Ultimately, Microsoft and Altman appear to be the big winners from the dust-up: Altman will continue leading the firm he helped to found, now with a board that is, in theory, more supportive of his vision.
“We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on X. “We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”
Publicly, Altman has long cautioned about risks posed by AI, and he has pledged to lawmakers and customers that he would move OpenAI forward responsibly.
“Is [AI] gonna be like the printing press that diffused knowledge, power and learning widely across the landscape that empowered ordinary, everyday individuals that led to greater flourishing, that led above all to greater liberty?” he said in a May Senate subcommittee hearing pressing for regulation. “Or is it gonna be more like the atom bomb — huge technological breakthrough, but the consequences (severe, terrible) continue to haunt us to this day?”
